Research Platform Engineering Fellow (Software Engineering) Full-time

Research Platform Engineering Fellow

This is an exciting opportunity for a Research Platform Engineering Fellow to help develop and evolve sciget.org, a digital research platform that supports scientific analysis at scale across imaging, biology, and other research domains.

Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team of research engineers, platform leads, and domain scientists, you will help shape the platform that researchers depend on for their day-to-day analysis work. As a core part of the role, you will stay close to the scientific use cases the platform serves, working with researchers to understand their workflows so that platform decisions are driven by real analysis needs.

The work spans:

• Containerised research environments that give scientists a reliable, reproducible foundation for their analyses
• Reproducible analysis workflows aligned with how scientists actually work
• Developer tooling and contribution workflows that support developers and community contributors in extending the platform
• Integration with national research cloud infrastructure
• Platform security, including container scanning, software supply chain hardening, and vulnerability management

You will be required to develop deep expertise in research platform engineering, while building an emerging research profile through methods publications, open-source contributions, and infrastructure design contributions referenced in peer-reviewed work.

In collaboration with senior staff and stakeholders, your key responsibilities will include:

• Contribute to the development of research design and proposals for platform engineering directions, including building and hardening core platform components in support of scientific analysis at scale.
• Provide expertise and knowledge to end-users and contributors for field-specific interpretation of platform data, integration patterns, and workflow translation.
• Maintain a state-of-the-art research platform including infrastructure-as-code, deployment automation, monitoring instrumentation, lifecycle policies, and platform documentation supporting both users and developers.
• Provide technical advice and support in the area of research software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and platform security to maximise research outcomes.
• Develop, deploy, and integrate platform infrastructure, including testing, release engineering, and continuous integration tasks.
• Maintain accurate records of platform configurations, deployment artefacts, and engineering outcomes.
• Ensure compliance with approved research ethics, data governance, and information security protocols.
• Ensure secure-by-design principles are applied to all platform activities following established research software engineering and cybersecurity guidelines.
• Contribute to research software quality assurance, code review, continuous improvement, and up-to-date operational runbooks (SOPs).
• Train personnel in effective and appropriate use of the research platform, including developer tools, CI/CD workflows, and platform features.
• Ensure a high standard of occupational health and safety, information security, and operational governance, including platform access registers, administration of research platform resources, inventory of digital assets, reporting and investigating security and operational incidents, and ensuring compliance with mandatory training and disclosures.
• Contribute to team culture and the broader research software community through committee participation, event organisation, and meeting participation.

This is a research focused, platform academic position. Further information can be found by viewing UQ's Criteria for Academic Performance.

As part of the UQ community, you will have the opportunity to work alongside the brightest minds, who have joined us from all over the world, and within an environment where interdisciplinary collaborations are encouraged. As part of our commitment to excellence in research and professional practice in academic contexts, we are proud to provide our staff with access to world-class facilities and equipment, grant writing support, greater research funding opportunities, and other forms of staff support and development.

The greater benefits of joining the UQ community are broad: from being part of a Group of Eight university, to recognition of prior service with other Australian universities, up to 26 weeks of paid parental leave, 17.5% annual leave loading, flexible working arrangements, access to exclusive internal-only vacancies, and genuine career progression opportunities via the academic promotions process.